by Marco Vichi
A few days later, late in the afternoon, Bordelli received a call at the station from Siena Central Police.
‘Ciao, Bonechi,’ the inspector said, happy to hear from him. But his face immediately changed expression. Piras, sitting in front of him, saw him squirm in his chair.
‘Fuck!’ said Bordelli, pulling the hair on the back of his neck.
‘Another little girl?’ Piras whispered. The inspector nodded. Bonechi’s voice continued to rattle inside the receiver, as Bordelli stared at the top of his desk in rage.
‘What time did it happen?… Shit, maybe we could have prevented it!… Why didn’t you ring us sooner?… Of course, now there’s no point in it … Wait for me there, I’m going to get in the car now and come … Meanwhile send someone to that area to ask around, see whether anyone saw anything … Where is it, exactly? Give me the phone number too …’
Bordelli wrote something down and hung up. Piras was already on his feet.
‘Are we sure it was him, Inspector?’
‘The girl had a human bite on her belly,’ said Bordelli, trying to put on his jacket but continually getting the wrong sleeve.
They left the office in a hurry and raced down the stairs. It was past seven, and the sun had already set a while ago. It wasn’t raining, but the sky was overcast and the streets still wet from the rainfall of a few hours earlier. The Beetle clattered like a tramcar, and Piras hung on to the passenger’s strap, lacking the courage to protest. On Viale Aleardi, the inspector gripped the steering wheel with his knees and lit a cigarette.
‘Don’t say anything, Piras. You can open the window, if you like.’
The Sardinian rolled his window down halfway, still watching the street with concern. In Viale Petrarca, Bordelli passed a lorry rather unceremoniously, and the pissed-off driver blasted his horn.
‘Did they tell you how it happened?’ asked Piras, digging in his heels as if in a bumper car.
‘The people live in a fairly isolated house in the country. The little girl had gone to the barn to feed the rabbits. When she didn’t return, her mother went out to look for her. And it took her a while to find her … The body was behind a stack of wood about a hundred yards from the house.’
‘How long ago did it happen?’
‘By now it’s been over an hour. Her mother didn’t call immediately because she was too upset.’
‘Fuck!’ said Piras.
‘We might have been able to catch him,’ said Bordelli, biting his cigarette. He turned on to Via Senese and started going uphill. Some fifty yards before Via delle Campora he took his foot off the accelerator. He seemed undecided. He turned to his assistant.
‘What do you say, Piras?’
‘Let’s give it a try …’
Bordelli downshifted and, instead of continuing straight towards Siena, he turned right. All of a sudden he wasn’t in such a hurry any more. Driving slowly past Villa Serena, they noticed that the first-floor lights were on. The Lancia Flavia was in its place, parked slantwise in the garden. Bordelli drove on and passed by the surveillance van, an old wreck with one flat tyre, which used to belong to the telephone company and still had its name on the outside. When they reached the end of the street, he turned on to Via Metastasio and pulled up to the kerb.
‘Wait for me here,’ he said to Piras as he got out of the car, tossing his cigarette aside.
There was nobody on the street. There wasn’t much lighting and it was hard to see. Bordelli walked calmly towards Rivalta’s villa, stopping alongside the police van. He tapped lightly on the metal body four times, and the rear door opened slightly.
‘Get in up front, Inspector,’ a voice whispered.
Bordelli got in on the driver’s side and leaned his neck back against the iron screen.
‘Who are you guys?’ he whispered.
‘Rinaldi and Tapinassi.’
‘You’re everywhere, Rinaldi … Don’t you ever rest?’
‘I’m not the one who assigns the shifts, Inspector,’ Rinaldi whispered back.
‘How long has he been at home?’ Bordelli asked, looking at the lighted windows of the house.
‘Since half past one.’
‘Does he often spend the whole afternoon at home?’
‘I’d say so.’
‘What did he do this morning?’
‘He went out at half past nine, came home at eleven, went out again about midday, and came back home again at half one.’
‘Did he do anything different from his usual routine?’
‘No. We’ve been communicating with the unmarked cars … Has something happened, Inspector?’
‘Another little girl, a short while ago.’
‘Fuck,’ Rinaldi and Tapinassi said in unison. At that moment the first-floor lights went out, and then a window lit up on the ground floor. One could see thick curtains behind the panes.
‘Tell everyone else and then clear out, all of you. I’m going,’ said Bordelli.
He got out of the van and went back to the Beetle. As soon as he’d closed the door, Piras looked at him with a questioning air. The inspector shook his head.
‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to forget about Rivalta, Piras.’
‘Is he at home?’
‘He returned at half past one and hasn’t moved since.’
‘Fucking hell,’ the Sardinian said through clenched teeth.
Bordelli started up the car and made a U-turn. As they drove past Villa Serena they both turned round instinctively to look at the lighted windows. When they pulled up at the stop sign at the bottom of the street, they looked each other in the eye with a strange expression, as if they were both thinking the same thing.
‘What do you say, Piras?’
‘I’m game.’
‘Good,’ said Bordelli. He put the car in reverse and backed all the way up to Rivalta’s villa. He pulled up beside the kerb, and they both got out. As they approached the gate, they both felt rather strange. Bonechi was waiting for them in Siena, and here they were wasting time, chasing their fantasies. But by this point they had made up their minds to see the thing through. Bordelli rang the bell and put a cigarette between his lips as they waited. He had time to light it and take a few puffs, and still the gate hadn’t opened, nor had anyone come to a window. He rang again several times. Still no reply.
‘Maybe he’s asleep,’ said Piras.
‘Strange. A few minutes ago he came downstairs.’
‘Maybe he’s in the shower.’
‘Perhaps,’ Bordelli muttered.
Inside the house they heard the pendulum clock strike eight. The ground-floor windows were still lit up. They tried ringing the bell again, but still no sign of life. At that moment a light came on upstairs, on the first floor, then went out again a few moments later. Bordelli tossed his cigarette butt aside and attacked the bell, keeping it pressed for at least a minute. But nothing happened.
‘Why won’t he come to the door?’ asked Piras.
‘Let’s go inside,’ said Bordelli.
‘How?’
‘With the keys.’ And the inspector pulled out his break-in device and opened the gate’s lock without much difficulty.
‘Damn, Inspector,’ said Piras in admiration. They crossed the garden at a fast pace, looking all around. Passing the Lancia Flavia, they reached the front door. Bordelli immediately got down to work on that lock as well. He wasn’t as skilled as Botta, and it took him a good couple of minutes before he managed to make it give way.
‘There we are,’ he said, and pushed the door open. The entrance was dark, but halfway down the hallway were two open doors with light shining through.
‘Dr Rivalta!’ Bordelli yelled.
‘Dr Rivalta!’ Piras yelled even louder. Nobody answered. Exchanging a glance, they drew their pistols and advanced as far as the first lighted room. It was a dining room. The table was set for one, and on the white tablecloth was a bottle of wine with a corkscrew beside it.
‘Anybody home?’ Bordelli said, entering
the room. There was a strange atmosphere in the place. It was too quiet. Piras had gone ahead down the hall, still calling out Rivalta’s name. The inspector went up to the table and glanced at the bottle of wine. Brunello di Montalcino, 1957. All at once he heard some hurried steps and Piras appeared in the doorway. His face was contorted.
‘What the hell are you doing, Piras?’
‘I went into the room next to this one … it was empty … there was nobody there …’
‘So?’
‘All of a sudden … the light went off.’
Bordelli opened his eyes wide, and his mouth opened by itself.
‘What the hell are you saying, Piras?’
‘I swear it, Inspector.’
‘The bulb must have burnt out …’ said Bordelli, hollow voiced.
‘It’s a chandelier with five bulbs, Inspector.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Bordelli, going up to the switch and flipping it. The light remained on.
‘Shit, Inspector, that prick has fucked us all royally!’
‘Son of a bitch,’ said Bordelli. They rushed out of the room and started racing round the house like wolves drawn by blood. They went up to the first floor, where the lights in the darkened rooms didn’t work. They lit their way with matches. When they entered a large room, the lights came on by themselves. Bordelli ran a hand over his head, muttering curses to himself. They went back downstairs and continued their search. A few mintues later they noticed a door partly camouflaged by the wallpaper. It was unlocked and led to a staircase. They descended the stairs to a cellar divided into a number of rooms. They began inspecting these and before long found what they were looking for: a complicated yet rudimentary device controlling all the lights in the villa. It was a great tangle of wires connected to a number of different clocks. On the wall was a big switch that almost certainly deactivated the mechanism. Bordelli threw the switch, then shook his head and punched the wall.
‘Shit, Piras! What idiots we are!’ he said angrily. His knuckles began to bleed.
‘It wasn’t so easy, Inspector,’ Piras mumbled, in a daze.
They started searching the basement rooms for a secret passage leading out of the villa, but they didn’t find anything. They went back upstairs. Now that the bloody device had been turned off, the lights functioned normally. Bordelli called up the telephone number Bonechi had given him, to inform him they wouldn’t be coming just yet. He also asked him whether there were any new developments.
‘No news at all,’ said Bonechi.
‘I’ll call you back later,’ said Bordelli, hanging up. He stood there staring into space for a few seconds, then shook his head.
‘Let’s get down to work, Piras.’
They continued to look everywhere for a secret door or anything at all that might serve as a way to leave the house unseen. Without success. In the end, they gave up. They went into the sitting room, served themselves two glasses of cognac filled to the brim, and sat down on the sofa to wait. They didn’t have the courage to speak. All that could be heard in the silence was the sound of their breathing and, in the background, the ticking of the pendulum clock, which seemed to grow louder with each passing minute. Bordelli felt his scalp tingling from impatience. Time was slowing to a standstill.
Then the sudden chiming of the pendulum clock gave them both a start. They looked at each other without speaking, their eyes full of anger over having been had. The clock finished chiming nine o’clock. An air of suspense hung over the room.
A bit more time went by, and then, at a certain point, they heard a dull thud, as if from a closing door, and immediately some weary footsteps in the hallway. They leapt to their feet, hands on their pistols, holding their breath. The steps drew closer, stopped for a moment, then continued. They heard a yawn, and a second later Rivalta entered the room with an extinguished torch in his hand. Seeing the two policemen, he froze. He looked at them both for a few seconds, eyes full of contempt, then smiled haughtily, shrugged, and calmly went and sat down on the sofa. Setting the torch down on the coffee table, he picked up Piras’s glass of cognac and took a sip.
‘Well, what should we talk about? Cecco Angiolieri?’17 he asked in a serious tone.
‘Been out Siena way, Dr Rivalta?’ Bordelli asked, staring at him, images of the little girls’ dead bodies flashing through his mind.
‘I’ve been wherever I please,’ said Rivalta.
Piras clenched his jaw, eyes full of malice.
‘Ingenious lighting system you’ve got,’ said Bordelli.
‘I enjoy working with my hands,’ said Rivalta.
‘How many more were you planning to kill?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Rivalta said calmly.
‘You know perfectly well,’ said Piras, face hard as a rock.
‘Oh, do I?’ said Rivalta. And as he reached for the cigarette case on the table, Piras pointed his gun at him.
‘The boy’s nervous, isn’t he?’ Rivalta said, smiling. He took a cigarette and lit it, blowing the smoke out through his nostrils.
Piras snatched the cigarette from his lips, threw it on the floor and crushed it with his shoe.
‘Smoking gets on my nerves,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know you were so impolite,’ Rivalta said, amused.
‘If it wasn’t you, then why did you need to leave the house on the sly?’ Bordelli asked with seeming calm, clenching his fists in his pockets.
‘I like to play cops and robbers,’ said Rivalta, taking another cigarette.
‘Where is the secret passage?’ asked Piras, increasingly upset.
‘Well, if I tell you, then it’s not a game any more.’ Rivalta lit his cigarette and blew the smoke upwards, making a show of his desire not to bother the young Sardinian.
‘Why did you kill them?’ Bordelli asked again.
‘I’m a bit tired, you’ll have to excuse me. I really don’t feel like talking just now,’ Rivalta said calmly. From that moment on, he didn’t say another word. He limited himself to looking the two policemen in the eye and smiling coldly.
In the end Bordelli got fed up, called for a car and turned Rivalta over to two officers, ordering them to take him to headquarters and to keep an eye on him at all times. Then, with Piras’s help, he resumed looking for the secret passage. After half an hour of vain attempts, they discovered a hidden door in the tiled wall of the kitchen. They set about looking for the device to open it, and after a brief search Piras discovered a tile on the opposite wall that served as a push-button. The door opened inward with a groan, and behind it lay a passage.
‘Shit!’ said Piras.
Looking into the darkness through the doorway, Bordelli saw a staircase leading underground.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
He switched on Rivalta’s torch and they began to descend. At the bottom of the stair was a tunnel carved out of the earth and reinforced with wooden framing, as in old mines. One could walk through it standing, and it seemed very long. They advanced slowly, for fear of booby-traps, and every so often saw the silhouettes of large rats scampering away.
‘What direction do you think we’re going in, Piras?’
‘I think we’re heading away from the front of the villa, which would be behind us.’
‘Doesn’t it seem like we’re walking uphill?’
‘Yes.’
A few minutes later they reached the end of the tunnel, where they encountered an iron door. Luckily it was open. They found themselves in a room with a floor of beaten earth and a vaulted brick ceiling. It looked like a wine cellar, but there were no bottles. At the opposite end was a staircase leading up, at the top of which they found themselves in front of a solid wooden door. It was locked, but there was a button on the wall to the right. The door opened slowly, again inwards, like the other. They went through, as Bordelli shone the torch about the space. It was an almost empty room whose floor was covered with dust. Piras went up to the far wall, turned on the switch, and the
light came on.
‘I want to see where we are,’ said Bordelli. They went down a long corridor full of spider’s webs half an inch thick and reached a large door. Opening this, they found themselves in a rather neglected garden. Next to the enclosure wall, under a canopy of sorghum, was a cream-coloured Fiat 600 Multipla, a rather ordinary car that wouldn’t have attracted much notice.
They looked up to the house behind it, a small, two-storey villa from the early twentieth century, vaguely art nouveau. After crossing a half-yellowed lawn, they opened the gate and went out on to the street. They were in Via Sant’Ilario, another cross-street of Via Senese, about a hundred yards from Villa Serena. Bordelli shook his head.
‘He came and went whenever he pleased.’
‘But that doesn’t prove that he’s the killer,’ said Piras, biting his lips.
‘Let’s go back inside.’
They went back into the house and started inspecting the rooms. There was little furniture, and everything was filthy. It was clear that, aside from the spiders, nobody lived there. In a first-floor room they found a few changes of clothes in a wardrobe. There were also several pairs of shoes, as well as some boots with fresh mud on them. Bordelli lifted one boot with two fingers.
‘If the mud is the same as in Siena …’
‘I’ll bet my bollocks it is,’ said Piras, smiling wickedly.
* * *
It was past two o’clock. Rivalta was seated in front of Bordelli’s desk, a venomous smile on his lips, ignoring what was happening around him.
Piras sat motionless in front of the typewriter. His face looked tired, his eyes bloodshot. He’d gone to Siena alone to see Bonechi and returned around midnight with a few specimens of mud collected from the ground near the scene of the crime. The girl’s name was Chiara Benini; she was seven years old.
The inspector paced back and forth across the room, slowly, a cigarette between his lips and his shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbows. He’d had De Marchi, a forensics technician, dragged out of bed and was expecting the results of the mud analysis at any moment. He’d also rung up Diotivede to inform him that he was almost certain they’d caught the killer and that he was waiting only for the final proof to declare the case officially closed. The pathologist had responded with one word alone, a word he almost never used: ‘Fuck.’
